• by Catharine P. Taylor , May 11, 2013

For all of the smart people running around the Internet biz, it is sometimes amazing to contemplate how absolutely stupid we all are.

That’s quite a way to start a column, huh?

Maybe you think I’m about to launch into some rant about our penchant to chase Bright Shiny Things, never having learned, from the first thousand things we chased – Friendster, anyone? --  that most of them aren’t worth chasing.

Actually, I’m going to talk about the reverse: the inexplicable fact that someone in our midst didn’t invent Vine sooner. Shorter video? Well, duh!

This thought has been percolating in my head for a few weeks, during which, I – and, face it, you, too – found ourselves spending little bursts of quality time looking over and over again at six-second videos. Just this morning, in fact, I spent more time than I care to acknowledge (and certainly more than six seconds), watching different variations on the theme: “Ryan Gosling Refusing to Eat Cereal.”

Good God, woman! Go fetch yourself a life!

But what tipped the scale toward a diatribe about how dumb we are to not have invented Vine several years ago was this statistic from a study on Vine by Unruly Media: that what I’ll call Vine-o-mercials are shared four times more than other ads.

Well, duh! Shorter video = more sharing. Who’d have thought? Well, anyone who has ever tried to share video, that’s who! Especially if it’s being shared over an unreliable 3G connection that seems incapable of holding its signal long enough to transfer a larger file. I could go on, but do I need to? The rationale for Vine is that obvious.

The sharing stat is one among many in the Unruly study, which was timed to coincide with Vine’s first 100 days of life – yes, it’s only been 100 days -- and analyzed 10 million Vines over the course of a month. What the stats show, generally, is that Vine is growing, fittingly enough, like kudzu. Some more fun facts:

• Five Vine tweets are sent every second.
• Vine-o-mercials (aka Vines associated with a brand) accounted for four out of the top 100 Vines, but only account for one percent of the top viral videos.
• People “Vine” substantially more on weekends, and particularly love mid-morning, between 10 and 11 ET.

Those stats, while instructive, certainly shouldn’t strike any of us as surprising. Just as Twitter took existing channels like long, yawning blogs and condensed them down to an easy-to-digest 140 characters, Vine – owned by Twitter – does the same thing. And it’s just amazing that no one had thought of that until very, very recently.

If you’ve been wondering whether it’s time to pursue a brand strategy for Vine, the answer is “yes.” This Bright Shiny Thing is for real.